Whatever influence the UK had consequent to EU membership is now gone exposing the fact that the UK has nothing and is irrelevant.

The only role the UK has internationally is as a stooge of the USA firing missiles whenever directed by the USA.

Now the UK is sniffing around the Commonwealth expecting to revive trade opportunities. However, that will not work because trade growth doesn't occur overnight, and Commonwealth countries have established trade relationships with others which they may not wish to disturb.

Britain once punched above its weight. Now we are irrelevantJonathan PowellAfter Brexit and Trump, with the two pillars of its foreign policy broken, the UK’s allies can only look on in puzzlement

• Jonathan Powell was Tony Blair’s chief of staff from 1995 to 2007

Mon 13 Nov 2017 06.00 GMT ‘I work in 11 countries across the globe and no one is interested in what Britain thinks.’ Photograph: Toby Melville/ReutersBritain has lost its way and is having an identity crisis, says the New York Times. Just as Dean Acheson’s barb that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role hit home in 1962, so did an article last week by Steven Erlanger, the paper’s diplomatic editor and former London bureau chief, claiming no one knows what Britain is any more.

The article sparked a storm on the twittersphere and hurt rebuttals in the rightwing British press. But the counterattacks missed the point. It is not a question of whether Britain still has some good universities or the gaming industry is doing well. The question is whether Britain still has real influence in the world: and the answer to that is clearly no.

As Simon Fraser, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary, said in a speech last week: “It is hard to call to mind a major foreign policy matter on which we have had a decisive influence since the referendum.” To put it even more cruelly: we have rendered ourselves irrelevant.

Just as blood goes to the stomach after a big meal, so most civil servants are working on dismantling EU membershipI work in 11 countries across the globe and no one is interested in what Britain thinks, even in those parts of the world where we had a historical role. Since the second world war, our foreign policy has been built on two pillars: Europe and the transatlantic relationship. Both are now broken, one by us and the other partly by circumstance. We are no longer able to build a coalition in Brussels behind our foreign policy objectives. No one wants to be seen to be working with a member state about to depart. And no one seriously believes that Donald Trump is sitting in Washington waiting for Theresa May to advise him on what to do on North Korea – as we were able to do with President Clinton on Kosovo.